Richard Cockerill accepted that a very inexperienced Edinburgh side were well off the pace in their 44-14 defeat by Munster last night, but the head coach praised his team for not letting their heads go down.

The Irish side, who had most of their top internationals back after the Autumn Tests, scored eight tries in the PRO14 match - six of them in the first half.

Cockerill had rested all of his players who had been on recent Scotland duty with an eye to next week’s crunch Champions Cup pool-stage game against Newcastle Falcons.

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“It was obviously a tough one tonight,” the coach said. “Physically we couldn’t cope and the game was pretty much over at half-time. But look, we battled and stuck at it, but Munster were the far better team and in the end worthy winners.

“We dug in there. It had the capability of getting really ugly at one point, but we scored a couple of nice tries and kept on working hard.

“But really, we just weren’t good enough. They were a much better team than us tonight and you have to take your hats off to Munster and say well done. We move on to Europe next week.”

Winger Duhan van der Merwe made the most impact for Edinburgh , scoring both their tries - one converted by Jaco van der Walt, the other by Jason Baggott. Centre Juan Pablo Socino put in a good shift too, but for a lot of the younger players this was a painful if valuable experience.

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Captain Luke Hamilton reckoned that experience was the main positive to take from the match. “There’s a few positives we can take from there,” he said. “Some of the boys got their first game. I thought George Taylor was outstanding on his first start.

“There was a lot of young guys getting game time, which in the future is going to hold the club in good stead. So from that point of view there are positives to take, but tonight we weren’t good enough - we were a long way off.

“Obviously that first half was far from ideal. The main message second half was just doing our bits right and looking after the ball.

“We coughed up too much ball probably in that first half, and we coughed up two lineouts and a turnover and they scored three tries from that, which kind of puts the game out of reach from there.

“We were making far too many mistakes. Second half we did a better job, but the game was long gone.”

Edinburgh are still fourth in Conference B of the league, with only the top three making it into the end-of-season play-offs.

(Image: The Offside Line)

Cockerill is likely to make as many as a dozen changes when they welcome Newcastle to Murrayfield on Friday for the first game in the clubs’ European double-header - their first home match since November 2nd. The return fixture against the Falcons is nine days later, on Sunday 16th, then they play Glasgow back to back in the 1872 Cup over Christmas.